[PRESS OFFICE] Fact: the effect of lockdowns and prohibition hit some industries like a sledgehammer in the past year. But for every distressed movie theatre owner, for example, staring at unpopped boxes of popcorn and empty theatres, somewhere down the road there was a happy grocery retailer flogging microwave ‘corn’ and Netflix vouchers.
And lying between consumers and consumption was the ever-present layer of ‘media’ for whom, as the latest BrandMapp survey of middle-class-and-up South Africans shows, 2020 was definitely a year of shifting sands. Of all the forces at play, it was the accelerated effect of ‘on demand’ media that proved to be the real gamechanger.
For starters, the massive increase in fibre-to-home digital connections (which rose from 20% of households before Covid-19 to 34%) opened up an entirely new smorgasbord of options for the 12 million adults (and their children) who earn more than R10K per month. So little wonder that streaming services like Netflix went from 40% penetration to 61%, and Dstv Now, on the back of a surge of 500 000 new subscribers to the service in the past year, went from 14% to 38%.
With all those bits and bytes flying around and an unprecedented variety of entertainment options available for anyone who can double-tap a screen, the question is: what has been the effect on the traditional eyeball and eardrum giants of print, radio and television? And what behavioural changes are here to stay?
These are the shifts and trends we’ll be focusing on in the next BrandMapp Telmar webinar ‘How to navigate the shifting media landscape’ on Thursday, 2 September at 11am.
BrandMapp’s director of storytelling, Brandon de Kock, will be sharing media landscape insights from BrandMapp 2021, focusing on:
- What the key changes are in consumption?
- Which changes impact on-demand content?
- How is traditional media holding up?
- What sources do people trust?
- What’s the next big thing?
Register here for the webinar: https://splashlight.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9UeVDy6pT-eL5A5w_7bYTg
